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Technology Stocks : Citrix Systems (CTXS) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Heeren Pathak who wrote (8008)	5/9/2000 1:29:00 AM
From: JMD	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9068

Heeren, although you are modest enough to characterize your comments as 'a bit of a stretch', I nevertheless think they are well taken. At minimum, 1) the vulnerability of the web to attack or other breakdown 2)institutions' inherent resistance to change 3)understandable paranoia regarding locating critical data off site and 4) what I fear will be a spate of very well publicized dot.com failures in the very near future--all will combine to moderate what I think would otherwise be very rapid take off in the thin client/ASP market. It is fairly well accepted that for a major change to take place, the 'new thing' has to be somewhere between 8 and 10 times better than that which it is replacing [if it is to overcome all the obstacles which cumulatively can be thought of as inertia]. The main point being that an incremental improvement just won't get folks off the dime. I'm a CTXS shareholder because I think their product offers that magnitude of improvement, specifically in the total cost of ownership in the corporate IT environment. I am, by default, the de facto MIS manager of a very small company. With 15 users in three separate geographical locations connected via VPN/PCAnywhere/DialUp/DSL running standard Office and one or two other niche applications, I can tell you that the cost to keep everybody up and running is staggering. I can't even imagine the IT bill of a medium, never mind large or enterprise operation. Just last week one of our users loaded some 'renegade' app and fried his machine. The cost to get him back is ridiculous, and that's before counting his lost productivity while he's down. Whenever there's an upgrade, we have to damn near shut down one location at a time for an hour or more. If I could eliminate our users' local hard drives, and keep total control at the server level, I'd do it in a minute. In fact if CTXS comes out with product pricing that makes sense for teeny little companies like ours, I'll be first in line. I'd also point out that the companies going into the Server Farm/ASP/Hosting business are not of the goofball.com nature: Intel, IBM, HP, Global Center, even Exodus are the JP Morgans of the tech world. When I think of our server [in the little closet down the hall] going down versus having it in the tender arms of IBM surrounded by real security, real technicians who know what the hell they're doing, real uninterruptible power supplies--well I'd switch in a flash. We're one heck of a lot more vulnerable having our stuff on site than having it parked with HP or Intel. There's no way in the world I'd hand off to rocketship.com, but . . . .well you get the idea. So you're doubtless correct to argue for caution, but as IT budgets grow out of control, I'd argue that a few years from now folks will look back on the current environment with incredulity at the money wasted in maintaining a traditional PC on every desk. CTXS has a real chance to make a difference, or at least that's my bet. kind regards, mike doyle